Nicola Braghieri, “Architecture, don’t waste it!” in The Generalist (Darmstadt, February 2011) 18–23
Written in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the essay is a polemical critique of architecture’s complicity with the excesses of late capitalism. Taking as its opening image a 1917 US Food Administration poster by Frederic G. Cooper — six precepts urging the wartime population not to waste food — the essay draws an analogy between that moment of enforced frugality and the structural crisis facing the architectural profession in 2011.
The argument is threefold. First, architecture spent the preceding two decades squandering intellectual and creative resources on ostentatious, media-driven projects designed for the spectacle economy of sheikhs and oligarchs, producing a formal language incapable of responding to genuine social need. Second, the profession’s economic model mirrored the broader logic of disposable consumption: glossy, unrepairable objects designed for obsolescence rather than durability. Third, and most urgently, architecture has failed to engage with the immense and growing population of the dispossessed — those standing at the gates of the developed world — whose needs demand forms of modesty, honesty, and long-term thinking that the profession has systematically abandoned.
The piece calls for a re-orientation of architectural culture towards durability, economy of means, and social responsibility, concluding with a citation from Ernst Jünger: a quiet appeal for a more modest, but potentially happier, conditio humana.